GeoHipster interview with Boundless CTO Andrew Dearing

As described on their About page, “GeoHipster is a collaborative independent online publication on geotechnology and culture, with special focus on open source and open data.” It’s a great way to stay in touch with interesting new things in the geospatial world.

A regular feature is a long interview with a “geohipster” (who gets to address his or her qualifications for the term as part of the interview), and they recently interviewed Andrew Dearing, the CTO of CCRi partner Boundless. Here is our favorite part:

Q: With the “stew” of GIS, data science and big data all fusing together, there have been a number of open source projects, like GeoMesa, popping up. How is Boundless adapting?

A: This is a great example of how quickly open source projects have been established to handle and support emerging IT trends. We are seeing many great projects, like GeoMesa, become the technology of choice to handle specific big-data analysis and visualization. This is not easy, but smart engineers (like the folks at CCRi) have been able to assemble code that massively scales to crunch through all the information you throw at it. We see numerous open source projects popping up that are solving some of these complex problems: GeoWave for big data analytics, GeoTrellis for imagery and rasters, and many more.

The cool part about all these projects is their interoperability with GIS projects like GeoServer. There is a great case study from CCRi on how GeoMesa integrates with GeoServer here. And likewise, we package the GeoMesa plugin for GeoServer with Boundless Suite, so our users can seamlessly set up and start seeing value from their big/large data sources.

The rest of the interview has a good discussion of the growing role of open source software solutions in the geospatial world, the new massively scalable version of GeoServer code-named GeoServer EC, and several other topics—for example, Andy is apparently quite a carpenter! The whole thing is a good read.